Wednesday, April 29, 2015

I
must have spent a cumulative total of five full days and nights on a collection
of “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” during a recent business trip - an
experience not even remotely as enjoyable or humorous as the one portrayed in
the eponymous movie. I even enjoyed a free trip to Reykjavík airport in Iceland
for a short one hour detour on the way home when our flight was diverted there
as a fellow passenger fell ill. I think it would be safe to say that I’ve now
taken Iceland off my bucket list. The place is bleak – even in October.

Anyway,
somewhere early on the trip, bored out of my mind in the hotel room in
Dubrovnik, or was it Bangkok, I decided to upgrade my iPhone software to iOS 8:
iOS8.0.2, to be exact. And I was off on a multi-day journey of agony.

My
iPhone music database somehow got out of sync with my laptop's iTunes library
music database and refused to sync music across the two devices. I'm sure there
is an “if” statement in there somewhere that says "I give up. I can't
figure out what to do in this corner case, so just throw up your hands and do
nothing.” No error messages, no indication of problems. Just silent
non-operation. “No syncing for you!”

So
I tried to upgrade to the latest iTunes on my laptop since Apple kept politely
reminding me to do so. Sure, let's see if the latest release of that software
fixes the problem. Of course not. But the upgrade also resulted in a brand new
iTunes UI and now I spent half an hour trying to find my way around. Still no
go.

So
I decided to go back to factory settings on my iPhone. When in doubt, Reset:
The software engineer’s motto. It must be the dozens of upgrades I’ve done to
both the iPhone and the iTunes software over the years causing havoc with the
database schema. Ok, finally. Some progress. I managed to get them to
sync. But then my iPhone voice control thingy went berserk and started showing
up every two minutes asking what I wanted it to do for me. As far as I can tell
(after half an hour of searching the web), there is no way to turn this
“useful” feature off. I could turn Siri on and off, but that made no
difference. This was some older voice control system that is still in there. So
much for listening to music on my iPhone.

Upon
landing in Amsterdam, I was also surprised to see that my phone refused to ring
even when the caller was standing two steps away and while the phone claimed to
be receiving a perfect signal. Reset the phone again, problem gone. Just
remember to do this every other day, especially if traveling internationally
and switching between different carriers.

I
will spare you the details of the dozen or so other minor problems I ran
into. So I gave up on the iPhone and tried to sync my music with the iPad - by
coincidence, the only Apple piece of software I hadn't upgraded through this
whole episode. And it worked flawlessly.

So
much for Apple as the shiny example of quality and user experience in the
industry. I guess that's what happens when your systems become bigger and more
complex and you have more and more combinatorics to test: Using feature a in application b on iPhone hardware
version c running
iOS version d syncing
with iTunes version e
running on Windows version f
or MacOS version g,
etc. It's just natural that you can’t test every case. Hence the quality and
interop issues.

Reminds
me of the old Microsoft days. And it's taken less than ten years. I guess it's
just a reminder that adding one more option to a distributed system doesn't
increase its complexity linearly. It increases it exponentially.

The
irony is not lost on me that I now have to carry three devices around with me -
laptop, iPhone, and iPad - and let us not forget “the cloud”, just to listen to
some music: a task I used to accomplish with a CD player and a stack of CD’s
just five years ago. Ah... Progress.

A
few days after returning from the above mentioned trip, I was happy to finally receive my brand shiny
new iPhone 6 in the mail. As soon as I stopped salivating over the box and
started using it, though, my enthusiasm turned sour.

My old nemesis,
the “Voice Control" system, was back, interrupting me every couple of
minutes asking how it could help, all while I tried to listen to some music. I
wondered if anyone else was hearing this annoying disembodied “voice” from
beyond trying to “control” them. Perhaps I had lost it after all and it was all
just a voice in my head!

Half an hour of
furious Googling led me to thousands of other similar complaints and hundreds
of proposed solutions – some including scotch tape, blow dryers, and chewing
gum!

It was only
then that I realized I had neglected to experiment with one variable in the
formula: the headphones! I swapped out my headphones and, voila, the annoying
voice went away. Apparently, it’s a known issue caused by a short in headphone
wires.

At least that
one bug was not Apple’s fault. Now onto the other two dozen issues I’ve run
into.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Have you
ever had something small (like a gnat) stuck up your nose? It happens to me sometimes
when I go for a run. Then you inhale sharply and it goes all the way down your
throat. You can feel the motion as it goes down your nose because that particular path is
not usually used in that direction.

When this
happens, I feel like "Otolaryngology Man"... based on one of those pictures in the doctor’s office. I'm not sure what my special powers are, but I'm sure I have some.

This also
explains, genetically speaking, why kids eat booger. It has nutritional value
and, as such, I'm sure it played a role in our ancestors' survival over the years.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

I was teaching my niece, Eden, who just turned four years old today, how to
play "I Spy". When it was her turn, she picked a word that started with "K". It took me a couple of minutes to realize she was talking about the camera I was holding in my hand. And then I had to explain to her why it sounds
like "k" but is really spelled with "c".

The next word she picked was "knife", a word that obviously starts with "n"... here we go again.

Can someone remind me of that logic again?
I'm a bit rusty.

Oh... and happy birthday, Eden! I hope your generation will be a more rational one than ours.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

My wife was
watching the show “The Good Wife” on TV the other night. I asked her if she knew why
there is no TV show named “The Good Husband”... because it would basically be a
reality show with many shots of me sitting around the house pounding away at a
keyboard. She didn’t seem to think that was funny.

I tried to get TheGoodHusband as a blog name, but it was already taken... so you have to put up with BenBob.